20.11.14

The Power of Blogging

Disclaimer - This post is part of my university assignment on consumer generated marketing and customer loyalty.
Continuing on from my 'Bloggers and Social Media' post, which you can read here, bloggers are perfect for delivering consumer generated marketing and creating customer loyalty. Bloggers can freely give their opinion on something whether it is positive or negative, it gives them to opportunity to verbalise their opinions about a product or service, they are not being told what to write, or how to write it it is 100% their own feelings.

However, sometimes this is not the case, as some bloggers get paid to write certain reviews, or to even mention certain products throughout their posts, because of this they can be bias towards that company, they may be telling their viewers one thing because they have been paid to do so. In addition to this, all bloggers ensure that they have a disclaimer and their viewers know which posts include items that have been sent to them to review.

Reviews like this from both fashion and beauty bloggers can be valuable to brands as it creates publicity for products, creating an awareness that doesn't only show the customers why you should buy this product, but how to use the product. To conclude, consumer generated marketing shows how bloggers are an important factor to consider when designing their marketing communications strategy.

Consumer generated marketing is created by other people responding to these posts, forming an opinion because of what has been posted. Bloggers can be seen as 'opinion leaders' and 'opinion formers', as they are feeding information through word of mouth, influencing where people consider shopping and what products that they should or should not buy. They are becoming a important and influential channel of communication as more and more companies are using bloggers to promote their products and services. They do this through the use of reviews, adverts, images etc, in order to create exposure to their brand. Word of mouth is considered the most trusted form of communication as it is consumer to consumer conversations, they exchange information that helps aid their decision making process.